Issue #17

Fall/Winter 1998

Memory/Place

Cover of Issue #17

I wanted to call this journal something like traces or residues. Not that I think memory is trash, but the feeling of looking at the handwriting on a rolodex card of someone who isn't there, but whose mind and feeling somehow persists, is like the feeling of dust on the tongue. Performance is always lamented as lost once the show is over, as is work done in the studio. Yet I have felt something remaining in the places where people thought deeply, discovered something, moved someone else, left their sweat and the echoes of their thought. The past haunts the aesthetics, values and structures of Danspace and Movement Research in some very direct ways. I remember standing on Avenue A with Guy Yarden who told me "we don't really invite critics" and a year later Carol Swann said when she started presenting work "I didn't want critics to come". This journal is a scrapbook, a collective photo album of events that only a small number witnessed, long views of what the beginning looks like from now, and close-ups of present memories in the making.

Movement Research began as a collective of post-Judson artists wanting to go into the studio with questions for each other, wanting a center or a school. Danspace began with Larry Fagin, a poet working with the Poetry Project, assisting dancers who wished to perform in St. Mark's Church. Movement Research is still primarily a place to study and Danspace to see performance: both support experimentation and risk-taking. It is especially great that the two have joined up for this journal, as Danspace often provides a public face for work coming out of Movement Research. There are many personal crossovers as well: the first singular director for MR, Cynthia Hedstrom, left to take over from Larry Fagin at Danspace. From the first she and Mary Overlie were crucial to both organizations. There is a huge legacy shared by both organizations; everyone in this journal has felt the burden of history staring back at them. It is important to get it right, to connect the pieces of one's lineage: yet in the physical act of remembering together, going into that squinty-eyed state of "when was that...who was there?" is all the fragility and random contingency underneath history. Here we have had the unusual opportunity to dig into the corners and be surprised at how much we do remember, and how those memories differ, overlap and enrich one another.


Editorial team

Editor-In-Chief

Anya Pryor

Contributing Editor

Carol Mullins

Design

Andrew Fearnside

Contributor

Catherine Levine Laurie Uprichard Christina Svane Barbara Moore Dona Ann McAdams Yoshiko Chuma Anya Pryor Daniel Lepkoff Nancy Topf Carol Swann Wendell Beavers Steve Paxton Luis Lara Malvacias Laurel George Jon Kinzel Nancy Saint Paul Linda Austin Clarinda Mac Low Ishmael Houston-Jones Terry Fox Douglas Dunn Yoshiko Chuma Larry Fagin Sara Rudner Barbara Dilley Stefa Zawerucha Koosil-ja Hwang Kenneth King Wendy Perron Myrna Packer Simone Forti

Articles

1

Editor’s Note

ABOUT THE TITLE (on memory) I wanted to call this journal something like traces or residues. Not that I think memory is trash, but the feeling of looking at the...

5

Invisible History

When it finally becomes impossible to take your friends to the places you cherished as a child, because those places no longer exist, then you truly feel the insanity, tenacity,...

6

1981-1984 Transition Years

After the collective (Beth Goren, Danny Lepkoff, Christie Svane, Cynthia Hedstrom. Wendell Beavers and Mary Overlie), after Cynthia Hedstrom, after Wendell Beavers in the administrative chair, along came me: the...

6

Notes on History

Having written down a memory -a memoir-several years ago, I have no delusions that it is actually history. Memory is not history. Sometimes this is easy to forget so I...

7

RE Dunn

Time is configured for us in many ways: astronomical movements, clocks, calendars. Subjectively we have sensations, suppers, and friends who create our eras, our memories of a time in a...

9

Poems

Thirty-five Telephone Books Frrriipp Frrriiiiip yellow pages—white pages falling balcony to floor Rebecca making them fly Clarinda dodging volumes of names, numbers and addresses. Performance-artist, poet-papa* nods approval of jeune...